Really cool. I wonder how they "combed through the pictures" if they had people dedicated sitting there for hours just sifting or some kinda naming scheme in the files with a script attached to find certain things?

Really cool. I wonder how they "combed through the pictures" if they had people dedicated sitting there for hours just sifting or some kinda naming scheme in the files with a script attached to find certain things?

Check out : Candeias do Jamari - Rondônia, Brazilzoom out a couple notches, and then you can see a lake being created, along with lots of trees being removed...

That lake was created after the placement of a dam used by a hydroelectric power plant built nearby (the Samuel Hydroelectric Plant). Today, it is the major source of power for two states (Rondônia and Acre).

Depends on whether you're a physicist, a philosopher or a mathemagician.

More to the point, if they chose to make time a dimension of the map then it is a dimension. Keep it in the context of the conversation. If they had made a map that allowed you to view the world as a function of population growth, then population would have been be the fourth dimension - again, in the context of Google Earth.

Put another way, if the map was 2D instead of 3D, then adding time would have been 3D - you guessed it, in the context of the map.

I wish ALL of Google's satellite and mapping products had a time slider. I've long wanted to be able to hit play and watch whole cities grow and shrink. I hope this means they've got that code sorted out so that we can go back in time in other areas.

I wish ALL of Google's satellite and mapping products had a time slider. I've long wanted to be able to hit play and watch whole cities grow and shrink. I hope this means they've got that code sorted out so that we can go back in time in other areas.

You can -- just move around or type in a location you want to see. And I'm sure Google will be adding this 4th dimension to their other products.

edit: just noticed that we registered on Ars on the exact same date and year.

I wish ALL of Google's satellite and mapping products had a time slider. I've long wanted to be able to hit play and watch whole cities grow and shrink. I hope this means they've got that code sorted out so that we can go back in time in other areas.

You can -- just move around or type in a location you want to see. And I'm sure Google will be adding this 4th dimension to their other products.

edit: just noticed that we registered on Ars on the exact same date and year.

Aha, I see that now. It's just my favorite places to check (old family estate in Canada, ranch in West Texas) don't have much history

Cool. I've been hoping someone would do this ever since reading Gary Jennings's "Aztec", and wanting to understand where Tenochtitlan sits relative to Mexico City. (Though that would require going back with maps, rather than satellite images, unless someone at Google has already invented a time machine. Since I have a couple of friends there, if they have one, I'm kind of hoping that they'll tell me about it yesterday.) Closer to home (for me), having read some of the history of how London grew up, seeing overlaid maps of that would be pretty educational - though again, I care more about the historical maps than the more recent photos. Though if it's tied into archived web cam footage, I'll be extremely impressed, and slightly creeped out. (I somewhere have photos of every room in my school from 1992, if Google decides to go there...)

very cool -- wish you could zoom in farther so I could see the area where my neighbourhood is now since it wasn't there in 1986.

they have a similar feature that has been built into google earth for some time, Historical Imagery. For my neighborhood they have data as far back as 1993, with about 20 frames or so. The Data is not spread evenly though, so it basically goes from 1993, jumps to 1996, has several passes between 1996-2007, then jumps to 2009-2011. So, all in all, not as good as this tool, but you can still have some fun with it. It provides images for me that are useful to about 500 ft per 1 length of their scale, whatever that translates to in something usable. (cartography is not my forte, not to mention my math skills which are sorely lacking as well).

This looks a little suspect, the images of the glacier are clearly taken from different seasons throughout the timeline. Not to say it hasn't retreated, but that's not exactly a fair time lapse.

Do you think glaciers are seasonal or something?

No, the existence of glaciers are not seasonal, but the snowfall/meltwater cycle changes which changes glacial dynamics across the seasons. Not consistently, granted, but certainly more likely to compare actual change from the same point in time within each yearly cycle. August's size of the glacier will almost definitely look different from February's, simply because the leading edge of the glacier in water will be frozen in place in February.

Here is Basrah, just to the south of the Iraqi marshes which were drained during Saddam's reign, and which have made a comeback in the last few years.. Zoom out about 7/8 of the way to see the marshes (couldn't figure out how to bookmark the right zoom level, sorry!)